you are the poem wildflowers write to spring
Ipomoea has never minded the silence.It stretches between them now, a thread so thin and tight he wonders how their breath alone is not enough to make it snap. The light from the arch turns them into so many colors — she is the soft blush of the sun rising over the water, he the bruise-blue of a stone buried beneath the waves. He used to be light, like her; he used to know how to forget all his worries with a song.
He listens to it now, the music whistling against the glass, the drumbeats of the festival echoing in his bones.
And he does not remember how to dance. He does not think he wants to.
The silence stretches between them and in it, Ipomoea can hear the world turning. He can hear the roots growing through the bones, and the wind whispering to the treetops, and the shush of wings overhead. The earth is both dying and living, wilting and blooming, a serpent eating its own tail and oh —
oh!
Ipomoea understands now. The beauty of the earth was not found in a field of everlasting flowers who never lost their petals to winter. It feels like a lifetime ago when he asked a unicorn why she thought the spring couldn’t last forever, and in a way, it was. He has died since then; he has gone back down to the safety of his roots and waited for the right time to bloom. He has lived in the winter — he is stronger because of it. He has lived to see spring return with the first blooms breaking through the snow.
She tells him his roots are chains and he only smiles. “All that I am is roots.” Does she not see it? Ipomoea was not only fashioned from the earth — he was made for it. He is the earth, every flower his magic nurtures is another piece of himself that he gives to the dirt, and the grass, and the trees. “And they have never held me back before.” He does not sound as sad as he did before. My roots are not my weakness he is whispering to her with his magic, as the earth trembles with the way they begin to move beneath them.
Ipomoea does not want to forget the things that taught him how to be brave, and how to love, and how to sacrifice himself so that others might never know what it means to bleed. He will not forget the dead.
He looks at her, the dancer limned in light pretending to not cast shadows. And in her he sees a part of who he used to be, a part that makes him ache from the memory — but what is growth without change, without pain, without wistfulness?
“What did you dance to forget?” he asks her, this girl who is fragile wrapped in wild. And what he is really asking, as his flowers begin to rise, and bloom, and press themselves against their legs like kisses — is what are you so afraid of?
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